CapitalistImperialistPig

I'm reading a new book, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970 by John Darwin. An early quote: It was also the case that British expansion had no master-plan. It had almost always been true that colonial schemes or their commercial equivalents were devised not by governments but by private enthusiasts in search of wealth, virtue or religious redemption. Sometimes they dragged Whitehall in their wake, to get its protection, secure a monopoly or obtain a licence to rule through a charter or patent. By ‘insider-dealing’ in the political world, they might conscript Whitehall's resources for their colony-building. Sometimes Whitehall insisted on an imperial claim on its soldiers’ or sailors’ advice, or to appease a popular outcry. But, once entrenched at their beachhead, the ‘men on the spot’ were hard to restrain, awkward to manage and impossible to abandon. Darwin (2009-10-15). The Empire Project (p. 3). Cambridge University Press. Kindle E...

It's a familiar notion, at least on the economic left, that capitalist industrialism was built on the surplus extracted from Europe's colonies. I wonder if the truth might not be almost the reverse: that the colonies were build from the surplus extracted from industrialization. Spain and Portugal were the foremost early colonial powers, and extracted fantastic fortunes from their brutally oppressive colonies. The trouble with extractive colonialism in the model of the various East India companies is that they give enormous profits to a few individuals but at great cost to economic efficiency. Rent extraction adds little or nothing to technology or production, but it also penalizes all sorts economic productivity, especially in the colonies, but also in the colonizers. Settler colonialism, in the model of the US, Canada, and Australia has generally been a big success - for the colonizers, though of course catastrophic for the victim nations). They have developed industrially ...

Arun has me thinking about Capitalism and and Colonialism. Many, perhaps most, of colonial ventures started with trade, or ambitions of establishing trade. That is a very capitalistic enterprise. It's when the capitalist sees an opportunity to establish a exclusive license, as in the British East India Company that he becomes transformed into a rent seeker. Many of the worst evils of colonialism are associated with the consequences of this rent seeking. As usual, the successful rentier makes a great fortune, but as Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations comes at the expense of both the colony and the colonizing nation. It's a matter of economic efficiency. My attempts to find a good, reasonably brief, reasonably ideologically uncontaminated book on colonialism have so far failed.